How can it be that things have only gotten worse since we first burst forth from the stars?

Don't we all want to think ours was a more authentic time? We worked harder, laughed louder, understood the true value of the taste of dirt and risk-reward of the Big Wheel, blunt trauma to the head. Television shows were better, truer, except when there was no television and children knew only the blisters of the plow, the smooth beauty of the flour sack sewn into a quilt with arthritic hands, raw and reddened by lye.

Except when there were no quilts and we knew only the soft plop of the deer pelt as it slid from our thighs early in the spring morning before we've had time yet to kindle the fire and step into the morning where a saber-tooth tiger and her cub await, just a leap beyond the spear rack, always a leap beyond the spear rack because the irony of the world has always been, don't you see, always.